Then, what, 20% of it ends up going for that same purpose, after the politicians, lobbyists, bureaucracies and waste take their cuts?

Of course, that's only when they don't manage to create a worse problem altogether with their "program" by subsidizing the problem they were supposedly attempting to cure.

Ok, Gateway Preparatory Academy (GPA). True, they only accept students who live in the State that chartered them, because otherwise the State doesn't pay, but they've accepted every student who has ever applied. That's because they haven't hit their State mandated cap on enrollment yet.

Any other Charter school in the same State that hasn't hit the cap the State Board of Education is willing to pay for also accepts every student that applies. The only time they have a lottery is when they are no longer legally allowed to accept more students, because the State has set a limit on enrollment. The only preference allowed when they have a lottery is that the children of the people who founded the school may get a preference if that's written into the Charter. Typically that might affect a handful of kids, as the number of founders is usually half a dozen or less and their kids were all enrolled before the school filled up years later.

Also, the Charter schools in the same State have the same rules for expulsion, special ed, etc... as the other public schools in the State. GPA has 2x the "average" special education enrollment and 2X the "average" gifted and talented enrollment.That's because personalized education attracts both ends of the spectrum.

There may be other States where the rules are different, but I didn't found a Charter school in those States, so I wasn't required to become an expert on their school-related law. I do know the way things work in a few States, though, and non of them work they way you state.

Thank you for your considered reply.

I don't know all the details (just from what you've stated), but I agree that if the change was rejected with the comment "women suck", that's obviously a pretty big statement about the lack of maturity of the person rejecting the change. A big enough statement that it pretty much creates an obligation for the higher level maintainer to accept the change at that point because to do otherwise would cast them as agreeing with the immature kid that rejected it.

Inconsiderate behavior like that isn't justified towards anyone in the context of maintaining an open source code repository, or anywhere else in life, for that matter. Sure, the owner of the code (which this specific case wasn't about an owner, just someone with privileges) has the right to behave however they like short of causing actual harm to someone else, but I'd hope it wouldn't take much of that sort of behavior toward anyone before folks with a sense of justice and propriety would create a fork and go on their merry way.

In this specific case, based on their reaction to the incident, it sounds like the actual owners of the repository agree that they needed to step in to limit the damage this particular individual was doing.

I know there is a fashion lately to try and force people to be "gender neutral" in their writing, but "he" has for a very long time been a standard reference that you use in English when the sex of the person being referred to is unspecified. It's perfectly acceptable and anyone who is offended by it is either incapable of critical thinking, uneducated or simply looking for something to be offended by. It's not any more insulting to a female reader to refer to "he" in the generic when writing something generic than referring to a ship as "her" is insulting to males who happen to work on "her".

Should all men in the United States be insulted that America is referred to as "her" in the song God Bless America? No, because we understand that in the English language, one personal pronoun doesn't _always_ mean a specific human sex. We have traditions of usage that add poetry to the language and customs that work fine for communication, which is supposed to be the intent of speech and writing.

So yeah, you can signal your feminism group-think all you want by writing or saying something stupid like "him/her" or "s/he", but depending on your audience, you're likely saying more about the influence of your modern teachers and your personal inability to discern importance than you are about anything of significance.

The world death rate is about .85%/year, or over 5 years, ~4.25%. The world birth rate is about 2%/year, or over 5 years, about 10%.

Now factor in how much people's wealth changes, which is relatively consistent as they get older.

So yeah, add all that up and I'd call it pretty significant for only 5 years later.

if 90 percent of people were in the initial cohort and 90 percent of people were in the final cohort, at least 80 percent would still be in the lower 90 percent.

I said they have as a whole become wealthier. That doesn't require much movement among the cohorts, because the cohorts are based on percentages of population, not absolute wealth levels.

My 9 year old daughter is debt free, but doesn't really have any income. That places her as wealthier than 2 BILLION people (with negative net worth) using your methodology!

There are "lies, damn lies, and statistics." Your use of statistics falls into that category.

It doesn't matter how wealthy people are compared to each other, unless your overwhelming consideration is jealousy. It matters how wealthy people are compared to how wealthy they used to be.

Also "the bottom 90 percent became poorer" is an inaccurate statement, unsupported by the data. If you took the people considered part of the "bottom 90 percent" in 2009 after the housing/financial crisis, those specific people have as a whole become wealthier. The current group of people (in 2014) they might rate as the "bottom 90 percent" are a significantly different set of individuals, many of whom were not in the "bottom 90 percent" in 2009.

Except of course, if you click on it via Google it bypasses the paywall because of the referrer data being passed... sorry, thought this was a tech site.

Use this link instead, click on the top result:
https://www.google.com/search?...

A pain, I know.

Because the people involved in the prosecutions and classifications don't report up to him as the head of the executive branch? Because he doesn't have an absolute pardon power to pardon anyone he likes? You'd blame the CEO of a company for what his company does. In this case the President has way more legal power to intervene than a CEO would in a similar situation. Heck, after President Obama's recent stint of just changing laws with only a fig leaf of legal basis beyond he said so, presumably his administration thinks he can just unilaterally declare they weren't enforcing the law in these particular types of cases.

Asimov did predict that alpha particles would have the potential to disrupt computer memory back in 1952.....

This is so the new vending machines can accept CokeCoin transfers.... and mine more coins when they aren't busy.

I'm kidding, of course, everyone knows a rapper will create the first branded Bitcoin copycat currency!

And then they'd stop after people learned to go to checkout to see if they'd "won", and if not stop or get a refund, clear their cookies, etc... and try again.

What country are you talking about? The U.S. has been going steadily away from laissez faire capitalism for at least 100 years now... to the point where it might actually start turning back in the other direction as more and more centrally-planned fiascoes are revealed and the old socialist hippies start dying off.

Your other disconnect seems to be thinking that "corporation as top tier person" is laissez faire, as opposed to a government rent-seeking benefit largely found in countries with more government control of the economy. Pro-economic freedom doesn't necessarily mean pro-government organized corporation.

that left tens of millions without health insurance

At this rate, it's highly likely that there will be more uninsured in the U.S. over the next few years than over the last few years. That's what happens when you make a product significantly more expensive and more difficult to sell and to purchase.

If you think things are bad now, wait until next year when the business mandate that Obama unilaterally delayed kicks in. That's going to be even worse for the people who already had insurance....

The real question is why the Democrats needed to take over the entire health insurance industry if the goal was to just help pay for insurance for a few million folks that didn't have it and wanted it. You could have covered that with a check just out of what's been spent on the federal and state ACA exchanges.

The reality is that this has always been about the Dems making a federal power grab over health insurance and the health industry. That was never going to do anything but make the already massive government-induced problems in the insurance and health industries worse.